


Incipient

by Interrobam



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Alternative Backstory, Found Family, Gen, Mostly Canon Protoforms, Noncanon Pronouns, Prewar Cybertron, Special Interests, The Dead End - Freeform, autistic characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-27
Updated: 2016-11-27
Packaged: 2018-09-02 15:44:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8673115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Interrobam/pseuds/Interrobam
Summary: Ravage rose from her place in the alleyway, each plate of her frame sliding smoothly over its neighbor like a swarm of nanites. Her audials rotated, her shoulders bobbed, as she moved silently into the shadows. 
Something had been screaming for the past seven hours, and it was up to her to put a stop to it.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [salticidae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/salticidae/gifts).



> Content Warnings: hunger, homelessness, briefly considered violence towards a protoform (baby equivalent), in-universe ableism

Something had been screaming for the past seven hours.

Earlier that cycle, before the wretched noise had begun, Ravage had made careful record of a conversation overheard between a relinquishment clinician and what she guesses to be an undercover enforcer. Their exchange had been studded with a newly emerged argot, one she had only recently become familiar with. She had tucked the file carefully into her Interest Databanks, intending to spend the long late hours of the cycle playing through it before retiring into recharge. There were not many opportunities to enjoy yourself in the Ends. When you found one it had to be savored slowly, like an energon goodie melted over the glossa and pooled beneath the palate before being fed into the tank.

She was trying to do just this-- reviewing the data, marking inflection, measuring pauses, drawing tentative links to other files, cross referencing vocabularies, integrating it slowly and meticulously into her memory. But the ceaseless _whining_ , the grating and unchanging _screech_ , was making it impossible. Ravage had keen senses, her hearing chief among them. She’d trained herself to filter out the worst of the clatter in the Ends, but this noise would not be ignored. Distraction during encoding was never good. The memory was bound to degrade with time, like an untreated rust infection helped along by trapped fluids under plating. It was only a matter of time before she slipped up and corrupted a section of the data. 

Ravage glanced up at the Buzzsaw and Laserbeak, a pair of aveformers with which she had established a tentative alliance. The birds couldn’t hear the din, because of course they couldn’t. When she’d brought it up they had taken to calling her Fritzy Felenoid, buzzing around her helm until she batted them both out of the air. Now they were gathered together in a private conference, huddled on the ledge of the building against which Ravage reclined. 

There was advantage in numbers-- what vulnerabilities they had as fliers could be compensated for by her own skills on the ground. They could get more recharge with another lookout. The two had made it clear straight away that they weren’t going to pool fuel. Ravage didn’t at all mind being denied that commonality. She could handle fuel herself. 

Ravage could feel, when she targeted her electroreceptors just so, the buzzing cloud of data between them. They were performing a mutual backup, as they did at least once a cycle. Exchanging, preserving. Sharing.

Ravage had lost that intimacy. 

It was not long ago, and it still stung fresh. She thought of Nightstalker, the way she’d organised her bytes of data by collection date, her peculiar use of color flags.

Her claws unsheathed briefly against the floor. Nightstalker was a nonissue. She had chosen her side, and Ravage was not about to follow her. She had already purged the other cassette’s data from her storage. No doubt Nightstalker had deleted her’s in turn. Without a partner or carrier, her own data was imperiled. Caught stealing fuel or loitering, she could be wiped. 

The full wipes that had threatened her kind in the age of the ratioists-- the very violation that had made cassette partnership necessary-- had been outlawed for a long time. Not that it meant much, mere matters of lawfulness did not have a particularly good track record of stopping enforcers from carrying out their sadistic whims on whoever they could get away with. Even if she could somehow insure a fair trial, partial wipes were entirely legal, and remained common as punishments. Without a backup, she’d never be able recover her collection. The stress of this knowledge was taking it’s toll. 

It was hard to motivate herself to collect and organise her Interest Database when she knew it could be ripped from her at any time. But trying to suppress data collection was impossible. Even if it _were_ possible, she wouldn’t want to. Her Interest Database was her self. It was as vital a component of her body as her transformation cog. It dampened the anxiety that loomed so large in her mind, it allowed her perfectionism an outlet over which it had the power to exert itself. Outsiders did not understand. For a cassette, the loss or neglect of Interest Data was akin to spark death. 

Somewhere out there, something was wailing her death march.

And it was up to Ravage to silence it.

She rose from her place in the alleyway, each plate of her frame sliding smoothly over its neighbor like a swarm of nanites. Her audials rotated, her processor weaving together streams of input to create a rough range of areas the noise might originate from. Her shoulders bobbed as she moved silently into the shadows. 

 

The harbinger of her doom turned out to be a protoform. 

A dark grey cube, still warm and malleable. It was quite small still, clearly it had not yet risen. A visual inspection of the surrounding surface indicated that it had just recently disconnected from the planet. How it was making a noise, she couldn’t guess. It had no speakers, no intake. It was too new for its voxcoder to be anything more than a lump of metal. It was weak and vulnerable and if she wanted to she could tear into it with her claws, shred the protoform away from the spark and let it bleed out. Quick and easy, no more screaming.

She snuffled at the thing with her muzzle. If she could just figure out a way to turn it’s noise maker _off_. She lifted a tentative paw and bapped it gently, gel pads cool against the newly formed sentio metalico. It stopped howling. 

Ravage flickered her optics. 

She removed her paw from it’s surface. It started wailing again . She bapped another one of it’s sides. It stopped. She removed her paw. It started. She bent down and gave it a tentative lick. It warbled. She gave a few more licks, firmly. It stopped.

...She really, _really_ did not need another tank to fuel. 

Especially not a protoform. Especially not a protoform who’s circuitry was likely coming in malformed, who needed more attention than the standard postnatal would have to give-- especially to a protoform that has grown out of a dump like this. It would need constant contact, constant comfort. Already it was starting up another bout of noise.

Ravage huffed, bowed her head, and took the cube into her mouth. She glanced around, then quickly turned, slinking away with the protoform cradled in her jaws.

 

“What in the name of adaptus’ cog is _that_?” was the only greeting offered to her as she returned to their hideaway.

“The screaming thing,” she answered, as if this should be apparent to Laserbeak.

“You gonna eat it?” Buzzsaw asked.

“No.”

The birds huddled together, exchanged a tearse series of clicks and beeps before turning their attention back to her.

“We ain’t fueling it.”

“Such a drastic about-face from your normal generosity,” Ravage replied dryly. She scrutinised her sector of floor, scraping at some debris before circling around and laying down. She placed the cube beneath her upper thorax, where the warmth of her spark was strongest, and draped an arm over top it. She rumbled her engine in a purr and waited for the protoform to settle as she considered her next move. The birds, in their own way, had brought up a valid point: if the protoform wasn’t fueled it would start to whither. And if it withered, it would scream. She huffed her vents, mulling it over.

“I’m sure I could scavenge some rust sticks,” she mused, rolling her helm to the side to eye her companions “If either of you would be willing to sit on it, _gently_ , while I was gone.” The two aveformers considered her glyphs.

“We aint about to fight off proto-nappers, if that’s what you expect.”

“I don’t expect you to fight. I expect you to sit on something. Or is that too much of a _challenge_ for you?” she asked, a small flick of her tail underlining her aggressively aloof annoyance. The bird chattered some more, she laid her chin over the top of the protoform.

“Okay,” Laserbeak croaked, “but there better be enough for _both_ of us.” 

 

Ravage came back with an entire case in her jaws just for the satisfaction of shutting them up. Which backfired slightly when Buzzsaw got excited enough to launch off the protoform and into the air, crumpling it slightly and setting off another piercing wail. Ravage whacked the bird in midair, not enough to crash but enough to destabilise, and smirked silently at the resulting outraged squawk. She shook her helm, tossing the case to the side for the birds to feast upon, and approached the wailing newform with a huff of her vents. She turned it over a few times, patting it firmly, and then curled around it, engine rumbling. After a second or two it calmed back down, and Ravage nosed a storage panel in her flank open, carefully removing a half-full cube of energon and placing it on the ground.

She dipped her tongue in the fuel, then turned and licked the protoform. She gave it a thorough coating, which it absorbed within minutes. She took in another few licks from the cube for her own tanks, returning the rest to her flank. Finally free from incessant distraction, she relaxed her actuators and mulled through her argot recording.

 

Every half hour or so, in between bouts of encoding and analysis, she would take out her pilfered energon and give the protoform a few more licks. She wasn’t exactly sure what she was basing that schedule on-- she had never acted as a postnatal before. But she knew the basics: protoforms needed to be kept warm and provided fuel until they were done developing and began to expand into their ultimate sizes. So she encoded, and analysed, and licked, and rested.

 

Within a few hours the protoform had begun to develop features. A dark optical window appeared, and a thin band of red light slowly filled it.

“That thing is gonna rise soon,” Laserbeak pointed out, glowing eyes focused sharply on the newform. “We even know how big it’s gonna be?”

“I thought you two were going to recharge,” Ravage mused. “I was looking forward to the peace.” She turned the cube over curiously, patting it a few more times with the soft gel treads of her paws. Satisfied, she turned to the ration of fuel, only to find it empty. She huffed, rolling over and opening the storage panel on the other side of her flank, removing the second cube she had managed to scavenge while the birds were newform-warming.

“We’ll designate it Fuel Guzzle,” Buzzsaw remarked, lazily tearing up the now empty rust stick case and sticking strips of it into their perch. Ravage folded her audials down in annoyance.

“I am it’s primary postnatal, and I will be designating it after what lead me to find it.”

“Whining?”

“ _Soundwave_.”

The birds scoffed their vents, curling together and chittering rudely. Ravage lapped up some fuel and smeared it over Soundwave’s visor.

Legs developed next, at the moment yet too small for locomotion. Ravage licked them, stimulating them to kick. It looked like it might be bipedal. That could be useful. 

In the next half hour a lump began to form beneath the visor, and an hour later the lump had popped out of the side, a sort of sphere with what could be the beginnings of horns on each side of it. The development of (what Ravage assumed was going to be) a head made it a tad more difficult to maneuver the thing, but she found that a sharp bap could pop it back in temporarily-- giving her a minute to turn it properly without too much fuss. She maneuvered it onto what she was now fairly certain would be it’s back, forelimbs tucked around it to keep it raised off of the cold ground, engine rumbling warmly.

 

In the next hour the sun had begun to rise and another feature had begun to develop, a glossy inset rectangle on it’s front.

“Well that’s weird.”

“Could be a windshield.” 

“I’m calling jeep.”

Ravage ignored the aveformers-- who had clearly decided that their color commentary was more important than a proper defragmentation cycle. She nosed the new feature then rested her helm over it, feeling the heat of transforming metal. 

She rumbled her engine and shuttered her optics, shifting into a mild recharge until she half heard and half felt a click beneath the cabling of her throat. She raised her helm, looking down to find the protoform’s inset had developed into a windowed hatch, which had clicked open to reveal, rather unmistakably, the inside of a dock.

The birds actually offlined their vocalizers for a moment.

“...Can’t believe the cat fetched us a house.”

Not a very long moment.

“I call the back slot.”

“Lets not get ahead of ourselves,” Ravage said, clicking the cover of the dock back into place with her snout. “Right now Soundwave is too new to decide if it wishes to take on symbiotes.”

“Yeah yeah sure, but when it does: dibs on back slot.” 

Ravage cycled her optics, shifting position and glancing back down at the protoform, who was watching her with an attentive visor. She blinked, slowly, and squinted down at it in pleasure. After a moment it flicked its visor, squinting back, it’s rudimentary field contented. 

Ravage pretended not to notice her spark glowing fondly inside her thorax.


End file.
